The Administrator Read online

  “Because you were the first person I ran into while I was floating down that gutter. If you hadn’t been lying there, heaven knows where I might have ended up.”

  “Okay, okay. I’ll eat you later, but now just go away.”

  “Promise?” The apparition’s voice was doubtful.

  “Yeah. Promise. Later. Now, GO AWAY! Ouch!” Her own shout rumbled through her brain like a freight train. Moaning, she lay on her back and clamped her head with her hands.

  Poof! He disappeared.

  A few minutes later, she chanced opening her eyes again, peeked under her hand, then closed them again gratefully. “Gone. Thank God!”

  I’ve got to quit the tequila, she thought and rolled on her side away from the window. Absentmindedly, she rubbed her left buttocks where the fresh tattoo had begun to burn. She barely remembered entering the tattoo parlor last night. Everything after that was a blank. She thought she was with someone, but she wasn’t sure. There were those two cowboys at the bar earlier but ... .

  Her head pounded a little less. She took a chance and opened her eyes, then she slammed them shut again. The faded, peeling, paisley wallpaper made her stomach churn. “Alice, you’re an idiot,” she mumbled.

  Struggling to sit up, she leaned over the bed, rested her elbows on her knees, and held her forehead with both hands. “A drink,” she mumbled. “Must be one here somewhere.” Her mouth felt like it was stuffed with cotton balls, and her own voice rasped in her ears.

  A smaller voice squeaked behind her. “You stashed one under the bed before you passed out.”

  Alice jumped at the sound. “Why are you back? Quit sneaking up on me, you ... you—figment!” She knelt and felt around on the floor under the bed.

  “Not figment. How many times do I have to tell you? I am a Mrpagalump. Now, will you eat me? You promised.” His voice was as indignant as a voice coming from a six-inch tall man can be.

  “Oh God! This is so stupid. My hallucination not only talks, it begs to be eaten. I’ve really got to go back to AA. Ah, there it is.” She withdrew a bottle from under the bed. Holding it up as if it were a trophy, she nodded satisfaction. “A good half bottle left. That’ll do.”

  Lifting the bottle to her lips, she glanced down at the six-inch man at her feet. “You still here? Why?”

  “You said you would eat me later. Is it later?”

  She wrapped her lips firmly around the bottle’s mouth. “Vyszood I eechu?”

  “Huh?”

  She lowered the bottle to her side. “I said, why should I eat you?”

  “I’ve told you a thousand times.” He sounded as disgusted as a person that small can sound. “It’s what I was bred for. It’s my destiny—I’m a delicacy—I must be eaten.”

  “Oh yeah, I remember. Aliens—spaceship ... big guys with little heads—breed you little guys for food. If you don’t become someone’s lunch, you don’t go to heaven. Do you really believe that crap? Because if you’re real, somebody’s done a real number on you.”

  “Number?”

  “Yeah. Snow job ... bullshit ... brainwashed.”

  “I don’t know what you mean, but I do know that if I hadn’t been so curious when the ship landed, I wouldn’t have snuck out the cargo hold to look around your world. And, I wouldn’t have been stuck here when they took off. By now, I’d be a fond memory on the Captain’s palate and safely in heaven. Don’t you see? If you don’t eat me, I’ll never go to paradise.” He sat on his plump little rump and held his round little head between his tiny hands. He started rocking backward and forth. “Oh woe. Oh woe.”

  Alice felt a bit of compassion for the first time in years. She bent and lifted the tiny man gently, cradling him in both of her blue-veined hands. Setting him carefully on the table beside the bed, she bent to look at him closely for the first time since he had appeared three weeks ago. She poked his plump tummy with a shaky forefinger. “Hey! Are you really real?”

  “Of course I’m real,” he blubbered through his sobs.

  “Okay, okay. Stop crying. Look, I’m not saying I will, but if I did eat you, how would I do it?”

  The tears stopped as suddenly as they started. He smiled hopefully up at her. “Any way you like. Broiled, baked, raw, whatever.”

  “Uggh.” Alice’s stomach lurched again. “How do your alien masters do it?” She was stalling. The vodka was beginning to make her feel better. If she had another, maybe this hallucination would go away. She slugged the last of it and closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them again, he was still there and still talking.

  “I’ve told you all this before.” He rolled his little, black raisin shaped eyes toward the ceiling in exasperation. “I’m a Mrpagalump. Primarily bred for dessert. If I was on the ship, I would be bathed in exotic spices, set on a platter in a bed of Volupian greenery, and served with an excellent pooberry sauce. I would swim in the sauce for a while, then some lucky person would swallow me whole.”

  “You mean like we eat oysters?”

  “Yeah, sort of, but I’m sure that I’m a lot better than those tasteless, slimy muscles.”

  Alice looked at his lollipop-shaped head and his doughboy tummy as he waved his skinny little arms excitedly. The red, white, and blue stripes covering his body made her head swim. “Look, Mr. Pugg-loomph.”

  “Mrpagalump.”

  “Whatever. Look Mr. Glump, you should think about this. If you are real, why do you want to be somebody’s meal? Why not be glad you escaped and enjoy life?”

  He stared up at her with as thoughtful a look as a lollipop can have. “I never thought about that.”

  She lit a cigarette and through the smoke, whispered, “Well, maybe you should.”

  “I would like to see if Marlena gets away from Stephano on Days of Our Lives,” he mused. “And, there is that new mini-series starting Saturday. Maybe we could wait a few days. It would give you time to decide how to serve me.”

  “Yeah. Right.” Alice turned to contemplate her reflection in the cracked mirror over the sink. Her straw-stiff, bleached hair framed a once attractive face that now looked sallow and drawn. Tiny lines ran from her faded blue eyes to her cheeks. She took another drag from the smoldering cigarette and snubbed it viciously out in the sink. “Where is that damn bottle?”

  Mr. Glump had poofed from his perch on the bedside table and was now sitting cross-legged on the coffee table with the TV remote next to him. He looked up at Alice and said, “Since we are going to wait a few days, we may as well get acquainted. It’s always better to be the lunch of a friend than a stranger.”

  Alice stared at him. “Why?”

  “You reach a higher place in Heaven, silly.”

  “Where is that damn bottle?” She found it empty and sighed.

  “What is AA?” His tiny mouth smiled and his tiny black eyes looked at her expectantly.

  “What?”

  “AA. This morning, you said you needed to go to AA.”

  “It’s where drunks go when they have no place else to go.”

  “Are you a drunk?”

  “Shut up, will you? Just shut up.” She saw her reflection in the mirror again and groaned.

  “May I go?”

  “Go where?”

  “To AA with you. You said I should enjoy life. How can I do that if you never take me anywhere?”

  “Oh yeah, that’d be great. I’ll just take my six inch DT hallucination to a meeting and tell my counselor that I brought my lunch.”

  “I’ll hide in your pocket. No one will see me.”

  “No one will see you anyway. You don’t exist.”

  “Then what can it hurt? And after I’ve lived a little, you can eat me. I’ll even tell you how to make the sauce.”

  Alice looked at the pudgy apparition. He looked more like a lollipop than ever. She glanced around her dingy one room apartment, and scratched at last night’s, now very painful, tattoo.

  * * * *

  A few hours later, Alice walked into her first Alco
holics Anonymous meeting in three years. Mr. Glump kept poking his head out of her pocket to look around, and she kept shoving him back in. She wondered why she tried to hide him. He was her hallucination. She knew nobody could see him but her. Mr. Glump’s irrepressible curiosity continued to plague her through every meeting after that, but she took him anyway. In fact, he jumped into her pocket every time she went anywhere.

  One month later, she had a job and had moved into a decent apartment. One week after that, she called her only daughter, in San Francisco, whom she hadn’t seen in three years. Her daughter was coming to see her in two weeks, and she was bringing Alice’s five-year-old grandson. Alice didn’t mention Mr. Glump.

  After she called her daughter, Alice was chain smoking and pacing the floor while Mr. Glump sat giggling in front of the TV.

  “Mr. Glump, it’s been over a month since I’ve had a drink. Why aren’t you gone?”

  “Because you didn’t eat me.” He poofed from his TV seat to stand on the table facing her. He looked down at the fashion doll shoes she had given him, tugged at the fashion doll clothes she made him wear, and shuffled his foot back and forth. “Alice, I’ve been thinking. Maybe you were right. Maybe I was brainwashed into believing I wanted to be eaten. Maybe we should wait awhile longer before I tell you how to make the sauce. I think, maybe, I would like to stay here for awhile. After all, Heaven will always be there. I can go later. Maybe a lot later.”

  For the first time in three years, Alice laughed. It felt good. “Okay, Mr. Glump, we’ll wait.” She shook his tiny hand with the tip of a clean, white fingernail and laughed again. “But, we can’t have you poofing all over the place. If you’re going to stay, you need your own room.”

  “Wow! A room of my own? Great!”

  Together they fixed up the cookie jar to be Mr. Glump’s room. Alice laughed, “What better place for someone designed to be dessert to live, than in a cookie jar?”

  * * * *

  Finally, the day arrived when she would go to the airport to pick up her daughter and grandson. Alice fidgeted all day, smoked a pack of cigarettes, and drank two pots of coffee. She attended two AA meetings, had her hair done, and got a facial just to keep busy.

  Just before she left for the airport, she said, “Mr. Glump, you better not show yourself for a few days when the kids get here. At least until I have time to tell them about you. Okay?”

  “Sure. I’ll just relax in my cookie jar until you tell me to come out. Boy! I can’t wait to meet them. Will they be surprised!”

  “Yeah. They’ll be surprised all right.” She laughed and pinched his rosy cheek.

  * * *

  Two days later, Alice had finally worked up the courage to tell her daughter about Mr. Glump.

  “Dear, I know you will think I’m crazy or drunk when I tell you this, but I swear I haven’t had a drop. And I never will again, thanks to a special friend of mine.

  “A friend? Mom, you’ve found a boyfriend!”

  “Well, not exactly. You see....”

  Before she could finish, her grandson stormed into the living room, “Grandma, you need more gingerbread man cookies.”

  “I don’t have any gingerbread man cooki....” She froze as realization hit.

  “Yeah, grandma, I know. ‘Cuz I ate the last one in the cookie jar.”

  The Idea Seeder

  Blurred awareness returned.

  Instantly, blistering torment blazed through his body.

  Agony impaled him with red hot spikes!

  Fiery torches bludgeoned his senses!

  White masked faces hovered over him.

  Bright lights exploded in his face, blacking out the bodies that belonged to the masks.

  Voices murmured somewhere above him.

  One voice yelled, “Get those damned cameras out of here!”

  Another voice, softer: “Doctor, his eyes are open. He’s awake.”

  Pain! Erosive torture!

  A soldier doesn’t show pain, he reminded himself and clenched what he thought were his teeth.

  Someone bellowed, “Nurse! Morphine. STAT! More ether. Must have a constitution of iron. With these kinds of burns and injuries, he should be comatose just from the pain. Hell! He should be dead. I don’t know what’s keeping him alive.”

  My mission mates. Where are they? He tried to ask.

  The soft voice again, “Doctor, he ... he’s trying to say something.”

  “Nurse, get him back under. Now!”

  “Yes doctor. I’m trying.”

  He attempted to turn his head to find his mission mates. There! In the corner. Three lumps lay still under white sheets.

  They’re dead.

  Large, frightened eyes in a pale face framed with dark hair pulled tightly under a crisp, white hat appeared over him. The person attached to the face passed a silver tray to the soft voice that had hands but no face, then quickly disappeared from his limited vision.

  Someone behind him coughed and said, “God! It stinks in here.”

  A gruff voice mumbled something about burned flesh.

  He felt a stabbing pain in his already tortured arm. A heavy mask descended to cover his face. Sweet vapors invaded his lungs, then blackness and blessed relief from the indescribable agony racking his body sent him to rest.

  * * *

  Fifty years later, he bolted upright in bed. Sweat covered his trembling body. The same dream again. The pain, the horror. The expression on that nurse’s face ... .

  He reached to pull the wheel chair to the bed, and in a practiced motion, swung his feetless legs into it. Wheeling to the computer, he tried to push the vivid horror of the nightly dream away by working.

  His read-only module access was limited to research libraries and scientific files, but they were world-wide. He was able to receive almost any information from anywhere in the world, but could not send even one byte of information to anywhere. He entered the code that accessed top security files that no one was supposed to be able to access. He had rescued them from the dump file just as they were about to be overwritten. Twenty minutes later, he downloaded the final document and listened as the printer sighed with a soft whirring sound and obediently defiled the pristine paper by placing the proper marks in the appropriate spots to form the words for the final piece of the puzzle.

  He picked up the paper in the three fingers and opposing thumb that remained on his right hand and read with lidless, laser enhanced eyes. They had given him the eyes after the accident. It wasn’t necessary that he have all four fingers to do the work he had been genetically altered to do. The fiery crash that stormy, summer night had taken one finger of each hand, both of his feet, both eyelids, his ears, his nose and one eye. It had left one damaged eye and destroyed all the hair follicles on his small body. Physically, he had ceased growing as his charred skin was grafted and re-grafted with living tissue that was not exactly skin. It was pliable and soft but didn’t stretch as real skin would, so the doctors had slowed down his metabolic process.

  The procedure had advantages. Although he remained just under four feet tall, only growing about an inch every five years, it also slowed down the natural aging process. In fifty years he had only aged about twenty. Chronologically, he was fifty-nine, but metabolically, he was still in his late twenties, and although he was a scientific genius, his emotional innocence bordered on emotionless indifference.

  The light above the entrance flashed its warning that someone was coming to see him. He turned his chair away from the computer and prepared to greet his visitor. He didn’t usually care if anyone came or not. Since he had never experienced companionship, he had not learned the concept of lonely and actually preferred to be left alone to work in solitude. However, today was different. Today he had questions. Questions that he felt he already knew the answers to. Except ... Why?

  His latest mentor, Dr. Kate, entered as the panel slid aside. She smiled and pushed her glasses back into place with a slender index finger. They never seemed to stay in place
on her thin nose. “Hello, Adam. How are you tonight?”

  “Fine, Dr. Kate. Please sit down. I have something to ask you.”

  She ran her fingers through her short auburn hair that was just beginning to gray at her temples. The touch of silver accented her high cheekbones and gave her thin face a bird like effect. “Is something wrong, Adam?”

  “Possibly,” he answered. “Please sit.”

  She pulled the only chair in the small cubicle in front of the metal cot resting against a corner wall and settled gracefully into it. She looked tired, but only a small frown creasing her forehead betrayed her faint worry at his tone. “What’s wrong, Adam? The staff tells me that you haven’t been sleeping much lately. Would you like some medication to help you sleep?”

  “No. No drugs. I haven’t been sleeping because I’ve been working on a project of my own.”

  She glanced at the closed circuit monitor in the ceiling. “Your own? You didn’t tell me about any special project.”

  “I didn’t tell anyone. It really began as curiosity, a diversion when I wasn’t assigned any work to do. It became a mystery to solve, something to pass the time. Now I need some answers.”

  “I’ll help any way I can, Adam.”

  “Why didn’t they ever give me feet?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Feet. They replaced my eyes, my skin, and last year, they replaced the tendons in this arm with electronic ones.” He held his left arm out toward her and flexed it rapidly to demonstrate. “But they never gave me feet. Why?”

  Her brown eyes widened in surprise at the question. She glanced at the monitor again and said, “I ... I guess I never thought about it. I really don’t know, Adam.”

  “Is it because if I don’t have feet, I can never walk out of here? Never run away?”

  She stood abruptly and took the few steps to close the distance between them in the small cubicle. She placed a hand on his shoulder.

  Instinctively his shoulder muscles tensed, but he didn’t pull away.

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I keep forgetting that you don’t like to be touched.” She moved her hand and let it fall loosely at her side. “Adam, I’m sure that’s not why you were not fitted with prosthetic feet. I really don’t know why, but I will bring it up to Colonel Gordon tomorrow.”